20/04/2014

The Shakespeare Code (Doctor Who)

Gareth Roberts, w; 2007.

It’s ironic, in
a way, that the best (and, perhaps, most ‘accurate’) depiction of Elizabethan
England on screen is to be found in Doctor
Who’s 2007 episode, The Shakespeare
Code. In a show about a time-travelling alien from the future, it’s these
historical episodes that can be the most fun, as Gareth Roberts shows here.
Filled with in-joke upon in-joke after in-joke, Shakespeare lines are peppered
like full stops in nearly every scene, allusions and complicit nods abound, and
for David Tennant’s Doctor, you can see he’s having the time of his life. With
its story of witches, a lost play – Love’s
Labour’s Won – words as magic spells, Harry Potter, and unrequited love,
it’s certainly not that far off what Shakespeare wrote about across his career.
There’s the mud in the streets, the filth, the gorgeous wood-and-plaster
buildings, the dark candle-lit interiors and, like a beacon, the great Globe
itself, and it really does feel, well, real, I suppose. As real as it can be
for a television show about time-travel set in an imagined version of 1599. There’s
more Shakespeare in this forty-five minutes than in the entirety of Shakespeare in Love, and that really
only can be a good thing.